Have you ever wondered if people knit anymore? I hadn’t because I assumed that it was a dying art from an era when times were simpler and gay meant happy, like the meat pack raffle and whipping up a batch of scones.
But there are still a few practitioners of knitting out there. Why just today I witnessed an elderly lady who clicked her way through a homespun whilst sitting in the waiting room we happened to share. Isn’t funny how knitters are their own biggest fans? She was clad in a knitted purple ensemble that included matching beret, cardigan and skirt. She looked like Grimace. What was Grimace anyways? I always thought it was the McDonalds way of appealing to the sexually confused, like all things purple. Barney the dinosaur is purple. Say no more.
See knitting was always on a hiding to nothing back at the start of the nineties with the advent of The Warehouse and the cheap synthetic jerseys they sourced from China and other such shitholes of the world. But the straw that broke the camels – or rather the ewes – back was David Bain and his wearing of several of the most ghastly homespun’s ever made. He didn’t actually have a choice in wearing them; the Filth had taken his clothes for evidence when they found him at his place. The homespun’s were from the Sally Army who they couldn’t even give them away to anyone not facing multiple counts of murder.
But the rest of us had a choice and we weren’t going to be caught dead in a homespun like his. Ever. Nana’s up and down the land who ‘never liked the look of that Bain boy anyway’, probably because he was wearing something like the kiddie fiddlers on Play School always did, stopped producing homespun’s almost overnight. The wool industry was nearly wiped out then and there. Farmers had to do something with their sheep other than sharing them and ever since have rooted only their own flock.
I’m bringing scone making back. ClubDes fights back! At least half the world’s problems could be solved if folk took the tine to whip up each other a batch of scones rather than a batch of P. Turning out a dozen scones takes only 20 minutes from prep to table, that’s a couple of handbag snatch and grabs that the Killer Beez wouldn’t get round to pulling if they were tucking into some cheese scones and not some Asians purse jammed full of cash.
I once made fellow metro sexual DG Macca a batch one night after he popped round to my gaff for a spot of man talk. There was no popping down to the mall and paying $6 for a coffee and a dry-as-a-nuns-nasty muffin from Muffin Break for us. Not wanting to look like a couple of poncey bummers sitting in a cafe we stayed in, ate hot scones with lashings of jam and shared manly stories. To finish the evening off we spooned each other on the couch. Thankfully our respective wives have never found out about the spooning bit – we’ve managed to keep that on the down low.
Not everything retro should come back though. Prank phone calls on the radio should not come back because it’s just not funny anymore. Prank phone calls as a TV show should never have made it to fucken air because visually it doesn’t work! I’d wager that you could dub prank phone calls over a porno, play it in prime time and it still would not work. People would put the mute on, clearly. Making a half hour TV show out of You Tube clips is just as bad. Who funds this shit?
I know a thing or two about prank phone calls. I was quite good at them back in the day. My mate Willy G and I would fire up the prank call when wagging school back in college. I would do all the standards – Chinese takeaway, Indian dairy owner, Scandinavian shit stirrer – whilst he would do the fresh Maori. He could only do the one but he did it really well actually, probably because he was a fresh Maori.
The call of mine they still talk about is the time I rang the local McDees and booked a 25 kid birthday party for my mate Shontell. They were very thorough, took all the happy meal orders there and then, all the desert orders, all Shontell's contact details (I had planned ahead) and never once questioned why a 14 year old wanted a Maccas party. Maybe they were getting over the fact that it was a dude with a chick’s name? The call itself was never actually that funny and it did cross my mind to abandon it more than once as it was getting a little mundane, so much so that I forgot about it the minute I hung up the phone.
Little did Willy G and I realise it would be the call that kept on giving because three weeks later Maccas hit his Mum and Dad up with a mega bill for a party they never attended. Who knew they would have actually charged for a no-show aye? Apparently they’d cooked the food and everything. It was a well prepared party I’ll give them that. I don’t ever recall admitting to Shonny that it was me that made the call but I think he knew, there was a distinct distance between us after that and I seem to recall he called me some very hurtful names. Very hurtful indeed.
Maybe I should have whipped him up a batch of scones to make it up to him? Or a David Bain homespun even.
No comments:
Post a Comment